Tag Archives: survivor

I learned a few things over the past few days. Some of it hurt, some of it made me realize how foolish I’ve been and some of it made me realize that I’m okay. Remember, I posted a few days ago that I had a sibling die? Well, I finally found her obit online. No big surprise, the adopted sibling, wasn’t mentioned. They like to deny that I was adopted but they can’t explain how my birth certificate got changed. But I pretty much expected to be left out of her “family”.

The source of knowledge

In reading her obit, I realized that they always told me that she had a Master’s Degree in Psychology. Apparently she didn’t. I found it funny that assuming her husband Charles wrote the obit, he left out the job that she was doing when they met. She was a soda jerk at a department store in Chicago. I don’t remember the name of the store, but they sold a drink called the “Green River”, it’s how I learned to drink out of a straw. And I found it amusing that that they got her mother’s name wrong. Her mother’s maiden name was Sanders. Not Yonts and it was never spelled with a Z. Beverly and Dorothy like to say that the spelling was changed so that Robert’s first wife couldn’t find him for child support. If that’s true then how did he get his brothers to change the spelling of the name too. And isn’t that a lot of expense for poor people to go through just to avoid having to pay child support? See if you look hard enough, their stories fall apart. And then there’s the matter of HIS birth certificate, it’s spelled with an S there too. If you change your name, they don’t change your birth certificate. If you are adopted they do. Which would explain why my birth certificate shows that Dorothy and I have the same mother.

But the real knowledge came from something simple, like trying to find where to send flowers. Somewhere in the back of my head, under my crushed self esteem, no matter how Dorothy treated me, I’ve always felt that she was better than I was, no matter what she was always smarter than I was, prettier than I was, and had nicer things. So out of curiosity, I found her address. The house that she shared with her family. And you know what, It’s actually smaller than ours. And this is the same house that she’s had since the 80’s. I’ve been jealous for no reason. The sister that I’ve always had on a pedestal even though she didn’t deserve it, was no better than me. So she had a master’s degree, it wasn’t in psychology. She was a social worker.